Websites That Pay Users With Blockchain Aim to Disrupt Facebook

David Kadavy used to post on Facebook without expecting to get paid. Then blockchain came along.

After stumbling onto a new corner of the internet based on the digital-ledger technology, Kadavy said he gets paid to post his blog and podcast on Steemit, a website whose text are saved on a blockchain. The site has its own digital currencies, the best-known of which is called Steem, and pays people such as Kadavy who post and comment on the site. Kadavy, a 38-year-old American writer living in Colombia, said he made about $2,000 in January.

“I feel like I’m in the Stone Age when I’m on Facebook or Twitter,” Kadavy said. “They have no value without what you’re contributing to them. If Facebook doesn’t respond to this, things can change very quickly. They should be very concerned.”

The so-called financial internet stands the Facebook business model on its head. With Facebook, users post content on the site and the company collects the money -- last year, $41 billion in revenue. On Steemit, the money goes in the other direction. Facebook, with 2.1 billion monthly users, may not even see Steemit, which says 9 million users visit each month, in its rear-view mirror. But Kadavy is just one of hundreds of thousands of people who make money by posting, playing games and viewing ads on the new blockchain-based sites and apps, where nearly every user action is linked to token-based compensation.

More than 1,000 such projects that record data onto digital ledgers and are called dapps, for decentralized applications, are live or in testing. And they often let users earn their special coins or cryptocurrency by doing something they’d already done for nothing on other sites.

Facebook and Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Worth Dollars
Some pre-blockchain sites let users tip content creators from their own funds. Very few did. Sites like Steemit give content creators a portion of newly minted tokens that are being mined all the time. Most of the tokens can be traded on exchanges, so they’re worth something in dollars. And like Steem, many of these coins have appreciated. Steem stands at $3.55, up from 11 cents a year ago.

Tokens are a big reason why two-year-old Steemit already has about 100,000 content creators, according to Chief Executive Officer Ned Scott. It just broke into the top 1,000 of the web’s biggest sites, according to tracker Alexa.

Steem Token's Market Cap In the Past Year
In Billions of Dollars